Founding Engineer — Real-Time AI Systems

Noctra is building a real-time AI system for situational understanding in environments where data is incomplete, latency is critical, and decisions have operational consequences.

This is not a typical AI role.

For the first phase, this is a remote role, and we are open to international candidates. Where you are based matters less than your relevance to what we are building.

We are solving a specific problem:

How do you take multiple imperfect sensor streams (video, RF, etc.), fuse them in real time, maintain a consistent world state, and produce actionable outputs under strict latency constraints?

We have an operational MVP.

It currently:

• ingests live video streams
• performs detection and tracking
• maintains persistent object state
• What it does not yet do well enough — and where you come in:
• multi-sensor consistency under noise
• stable tracking in degraded conditions
• latency-critical pipeline optimization
• real-time system reliability

The role

• You will work directly on the core system:
• building and optimizing real-time ingestion pipelines
• designing sensor fusion logic across asynchronous inputs
• improving tracking robustness and state persistence
• reducing latency across the full pipeline
• making the system function reliably outside controlled conditions

This is a system-level role.

• You will not work on isolated models.
• You will work on a system that has to run continuously, in real time, under imperfect conditions.

What we are looking for

You likely have experience in one or more of:

• robotics, autonomy, or ISR systems
• real-time data pipelines or streaming systems
• multi-object tracking or sensor fusion
• edge systems or performance-constrained environments
• GPU optimization or low-latency systems
• More important than tools:
• you have built systems that actually run
• you understand failure modes
• you optimize for reliability, not demos
• you are comfortable operating without fully defined constraints

What this is (and is not)

This is:

• early-stage
• technically demanding
• ambiguous by nature
• This is not:
• a well-defined backlog
• a mature stack
• a role where you “plug into a team”
• You will help define the system.

Compensation

• Equity-based (founding level)
• Pre-seed stage (raise planned May–June)
• Core role in building the company and technology

Why this matters

We are not building dashboards or offline analytics.

We are building a system that moves from:

• detection → understanding → decision
• in real time.
• If this aligns with how you think about systems, reach out directly.

[email protected]